Matteo Garrone Q&A

07-10-2008 09:03

Born in Rome in 1968, art school graduate Matteo Garrone made his low-budget feature debut in 1997 with Terra di mezzo. The writer-director's fourth film The Embalmer, a mysterious study of erotic obsession, played at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes during 2004 and gained American distribution.

His latest work Gomorrah, adapted from Roberto Saviano's expose of the Neapolitan Mafia, won Garrone the Grand Prix at Cannes this summer and has already been a box-office hit in his native Italy.

What inspired you to adapt Roberto Saviano's 'non-fiction novel' Gomorrah?

When I read Roberto Saviano's book, it had only been published for a couple of weeks in Italy, and at that point it wasn't a bestseller. I found it very interesting, because it changed the image I had from all the Mafia movies I had watched before.

I realized that I had an opportunity to do something very different from previous Mafia movies, many of which had glamorized criminals. I wanted to show the everyday lives of members of the Camorra.

How did you decide on the five stories that you have woven together in Gomorrah?

What was important to me was that the characters and the themes in the individual stories had a universal relevance. That's why we have the dumping of toxic waste in the Franco and Roberto story, and the confusion between fiction and reality of the characters Marco and Ciro, who think they are living in a Brian de Palma film.